Adam CP #1

Yesterday at a little after 4:00 p.m. I met with one of my conversation partners, Abdulmohsen. He asked that I call him Abdul for short. He has a Master's degree in Computer Science and hopes to move to New York to pursue a PhD in Computer Science from a school there. He is from Saudi Arabia and has a strong command of English. He said that he comes from a very large, wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. He talked about how his family is so large that he has numerous family contacts and often is not able to identify everyone at his family reunions. He frequently travels across the world on vacations, including to large urban areas that are popular vacation spots such as Miami and Las Vegas. We had a conversation about Dubai, UAE, where he said that he has frequently gone on vacation. I mentioned that I used to attend an international school in the United Arab Emirates when I was much younger, and we discussed how much the city of Dubai has developed since the 1990s. We also held a conversation about Saudi Arabia's ban on alcohol and talked about American food. He asked me to name some examples of distinctive American food, which is a difficult topic due to the fact that much American food was invented elsewhere. However, I did give the example of southern dishes such as hush puppies and grits. We agreed that we would meet again during International Coffee Hour on Friday at 5:00 p.m., and he would introduce me to some of his friends from other countries.

Matthew TP # 1

Yesterday (Monday, July 1st) I met with Leonardo Enrique, one of my Tutoring Partners. As this was our first meeting it was mostly informal. We met in the CIES lounge and made our introductions. For the most part we discussed how Leonardo was liking America, having arrived only 6 months ago here from Venezuela. We went over more technical subjects for a few minutes, such as what he wanted to work on and he showed me examples of the work he was doing at the CIES so I could get a better understanding of how to help him. I was impressed with his speaking skills, especially after he told me that he had arrived here with no English knowledge. While not always grammatically correct, he was confident as he spoke and we had very little trouble carrying out our conversation. After a while our conversation drifted towards his home country and the spotty relations between Venezuela and the US. He was refreshingly open on his opinions about this subject and grew excited when he discussed his family and his life in Venezuela. We made plans to meet at 4.30 every Monday and also made a rough schedule of what we would be working on.

Lila TP#1

     Upon my arrival at my student's house I asked about her interests to break the ice. I learned that she enjoyed drawing and painting and also knew how to play piano. After becoming acclimated with each other, we began learning.
     In our session, we decided to focus on reading. My student had been reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and so we continued together with her novel. I noticed that my student had very good reading skills and reading speed but her pronunciation of more advanced words needed a bit of work. There were times where she would apply rules to certain words resulting in incorrect pronunciation. For example: "reassuring" would be pronounced rEE-shOO-ring because of the "ea" vowel combination being recognized instead of the "re" prefix. Another example would be the word "sputtered", which would be pronounced sputter-ed. Obviously these weren't huge mistakes in pronunciation and it didn't take away from the experience. I was very impressed with the drama that she added while reading aloud. After hearing her read  about thirteen pages, I gave her a list of words that she mispronounced or didn't know the definition of for her to review.
     Working with her was delightful. Next time, I hope to bring something more challenging to the session, possibly a few vocabulary words or words with peculiar spellings and pronunciations.

Chan - TP #1

            It was no easy task keeping two twin 8 year-old boys engaged and participating in an hour-long tutoring session.  They both attend an American public school, so English is familiar to them.  Therefore, my job as their English tutor, for the first session, was to assess each boy’s strengths and weaknesses in using the English language.  (However, at this point I am spending a bit of time simply trying to tell them apart.)  I was able to determine what each child needs to enhance their English skills and how to motivate each of them. 

            For the first 15-20 minutes of our session, I facilitated an activity that had the boys choose objects from a top hat.  Upon choosing an object, I prompted the boys to write a sentence about the object and then underline the verb in the sentence.  Next (10 minutes), we briefly discussed the difference between nouns and verbs and then I had them each list five verbs and five nouns using cues that they saw in the library environment.  The learning style of each boy was distinctly different. 

            Next, the assessment continued by asking them to use an adjective to describe some of the objects pulled from the top hat.  Following the adjective activity I asked them about their knowledge of past, present, and future tense.  One of the boys was showing signs of mental fatigue.  He was looking out of the library window and frowning.  I asked if he was tired, and he replied, “yes”.  After this interaction, I decided it was time to shift gears.  I asked  if they wanted to learn new words.  One of the boys replied, “No.” 

            The other, looking pensive and pondering my question, finally answered, “Maybe...it depends.”  After briefly discussing what the boys enjoyed doing, we decided that playing games to learn was the best way to keep them both engaged.  We played hangman for the next ten minutes, which proved a good assessment tool.  Lastly, we reviewed the key points of our lesson for the last five minutes.   Both boys remained engaged with the lesson.      

Adam TP #2

Today I met Bayasgalan again shortly after 3:00 p.m., this time in room 409 of Eppes Hall. He was eager and enthusiastic in explaining grammar rules he had learned. He was keen to demonstrate his comprehension of the material. Most of his understanding of the material was correct, and he seemed to be doing a very good job at explaining what he was learning. At the moment he is learning simple past and simple present tense. I went over these concepts with him. I gave various examples of simple past and simple present tense, and asked him to provide his own. I also instructed him in English sentence structures, and helped him with understanding concepts such as adverbs and adjectives. The two terms confused him at first but I was sure to model examples by writing sample sentences. I asked him to form his own sentences using adjectives and adverbs. He showed me an assignment he was working on where he had to describe a hypothetical invention he was creating. He had some difficulty describing what it looked like (or difficulty understanding the question, which I went over with him by asking what adjectives he would use to describe it). He also showed me a short (already graded) paragraph he had written for class. The teacher's comments included "write more!" However, looking at the paragraph, I was able to identify his written grammar mistakes. I went over each one with him one by one and gave an example of the correct form. I asked him to give examples similar to those I gave to him, which he did. I told him I wanted to practice applying the grammar rules he was learning to spoken conversation. He seemed uncomfortable with the suggestion, but was willing to provide example sentences and ask if they were correct. I went through each example with him and assessed whether or not it worked.  Before we said good bye to each other Bayasgalan said that the tutoring session had helped him better comprehend the material.

Adam CO #1

Today I attended my first of three class observations. This one was a speaking class taught by Vicky Ledbetter at 1:00 p.m. In Room 409 today. She seemed very enthusiastic about teaching her class, and the students seemed eager to learn. Most students seemed to already have an at least working grasp of English conversation, as evidenced by their conversations amongst themselves. The teacher made sure to frame her lesson around a particular topic. Today the students learned about rooms in a house. In addition to teaching vocabulary, this would also have been a very good opportunity to explore an aspect of culture. While the teacher did not address differences between the features of houses in different cultures, students did comment on what features thei houses did and did not have. The teacher gave students a worksheet in which they were given a visual of a house and had to identify its different rooms and features. While most students at least partially understood the vocabulary, about half of the words were unfamiliar to most students. The teacher was careful to ask which words were familiar to students and which ones were not. She then gave a detailed explanation of the words that students had told her they were unfamiliar with. The teacher later assigned students into pairs to discuss th features of each others' houses. One student would describe his or her house and the other student would draw a picture of it according to the instructions. During the lesson she also assigned students into pairs and asked them to describe their houses to each other in an improvised dialogue. Students were given a handout that included sample questions they could include in their conversations. The teacher modeled both of these exercises by practicing these exercises with the Teacher's Aide, so that she could demonstrate what students were supposed to do. She was careful to catch student mistakes, and wrote a few examples of common "beautiful mistakes" on he board so that students could discuss them. However, she did not focus solely on what students were doing wrong, and in fact often gave praise and encouragement to students, such as saying "good job!" Ad "keep up the good work!" to her class.
The teacher used a positive, student centered approach. She grouped students into pairs and kept up a n enthusiastic, conversational manner of teaching. The presence of a teacher's aide allowed her to effectively convey instructions to students, as the teacher used her interaction with the teacher's aide to model dialogue and practice conversations.

PLEASE COMMENT ON EACH OTHER'S JOURNALS

PLEASE COMMENT ON EACH OTHER'S JOURNALS
so that you guys can learn from each other.

FYI, "Big Brother" is watching you guys. ;)